Poker. Is it a gambling game or a game of skill?

Poker, or most commonly played, texas holdem, is a multiplayer card game in which players play against each other to simply try and make the best set of cards and best their opponent. Each player is given two cards and a sequence of betting commences, followed by the showing of 3 cards in which players can use to make the best hand possible out of 5 cards (Their own + a mixture of what has been placed on the table for everyone to use). This is followed by another betting sequence, another card shown, another betting sequence, the last card shown and finally the last betting sequence.

By the end, there is 5 cards on the table for everyone to combine with their own two, to make the best hand possible and whoever has the card sequence of the highest value wins. Sounds like a game of luck right, as we have no influence on what cards come out? However that is the beauty of poker, we have no idea what cards will come, or what cards the opponents have, only what we have and what is on the table. Players use this to their advantage by representing a stronger hand or weaker hand than it might seem to induce or scare away people from betting, since it is the case that if you don't want to match a bet, you can throw away your hand and conceding the round and with that, the money that has been invested. 

So the question becomes, is poker a game of gambling a game of skill, or both? Most people will say that both skill and luck are a massive component in poker, but I believe some may over estimate the weight that skill has in poker over luck. If you were to just play poker once, with the variance that a game like poker has, it is valid to say that luck may be able to play a more equal part in poker than skill, because all it takes is a few consecutive spurs of bad luck to cripple even the best of players. But for people who play poker regularly, or even for a living, playing every day multiple times a day against other like players, skill becomes more and more prominent, as the affect of variance gets nullified after having so many intervals of play.

If there was no such thing as betting and all cards where face up and dealt out until the end of the round, each player would have an equally likely chance to win a round. Any skill difference among a player will slightly to drastically increase the percentage chance of a player winning a hand or a session of poker by many percent. If you extend this out to the course of 1000's of games, you will almost definitely see the gap of where skill outweighs the luck greatly among amateur players to professional players.  

Thus it is in my firm belief that poker is much much much more prominently a game of skill rather than luck in the long run, and I would not consider it as gambling for the most part. However in some cases the factor of luck can be a lot closer to the factor of skill in a given match.